itch.io

Thank you! I actually just finished a big UI redesign that I'm implementing that should help mitigate confusion. But yes. with only two buttons (four counting the speed) I feel like after enough time observant players could work out how things work.  No thank you to tutorials!

To be fair, the game was pretty different when I started the thread; back then if you tried to maintain negative heat generation to keep heat at zero and avoid risk of a game over, it took a good bit longer than it would take to fill up a 'level up' bar the game had to fill out your grid and level up, so I was left there staring at a full bar with nothing I could interact with without taking actions that seemed counterintuitive to the point of the game. Now the balancing and presentation of the game make it plainly clear what the player should be doing from the start and the problem is alleviated without need for tutorialization.